Should we have a namespace for real life people?

Nope, doesn't work that way. The trope is Historical Domain Character. You would then note that Adolf Hitler was the specific person being used. Also see Those Wacky Nazis, Stupid Jetpack Hitler, and many other related tropes.

This is the same reason why actors are not trope examples in the works they star in.

edited 5th Oct '11 1:17:19 PM by Fighteer

So if Britney Spears played herself in a movie, the trope would be As Himself, and Spears would just be a specific example.

Correct.

I think there are several reasons to prefer the Creator/ vs. Useful Notes/ split to the Person/ vs. Organization/ split:

• It clarifies the goal of the page (documenting associated works vs. documenting stuff about how someone might be used in fiction).
• The borderline cases are easier to deal with. Duos like Gilbert And Sullivan are neither people nor organizations. Bands may technically be organizations, but it seems weird to call them that. There are pages for people that are borderline between being Creator/-type pages and being Useful Notes/-type pages (like Mark Twain), but they can be dealt with by page-splitting.
• The Useful Notes/ namespace is already being used for other things, so it means less namespace proliferation.

People/ would include plurals if needed.

...and any organization is made up of some number of people. Where do you draw the line? More to the point, why is this a line that's useful to draw at all?

Well I would think that organizations would be something that isn't just a few people. Also, would organizations be tropes? Would The Mafia just be an organization of people used in fiction, or would it be a trope?

If there's a group of two people, I wouldn't describe them as an organization, but I wouldn't call them a "person" either. E.g. Seltzer And Friedberg. So, if we use people as well, then we've got three new namespaces to sort out.

edited 5th Oct '11 3:17:40 PM by MangaManiac

"People" is plural, so it can cover more than one person.

How is People better than Creator? One of those sounds like any average Joe that anyone wants to make an article about. The other one is something we actually care about.

Not every person is a creator, but they can still work in some way with making media. Creator/ is too narrow. Plus since we don't allow pages for someone like Bob down the street, we shouldn't have to worry about that, as we would cut such a page no matter what.

If they work some way in media, they're a creator because they're assisting the creation of media.

Okay, that's stretching the term too far. When we see the words "created by", it involves specific people, who has specific roles in making the show, even if they didn't do all the work.

Plus it wouldn't work with Historical Domain Characters, who this suggestion is meant to include.

Historical Domain Characters are Useful Notes.

If you have a better suggestion for a name than Creators/, I'd like to hear it. All I'm saying is, the pages for Studio Gainax, Joss Whedon, and Tom Hanks are all the same sort of thing, and should be classified together, while the page for Adolf Hitler is different from all of them, and should be separated (but can be lumped with the page for World War II). Lumping Whedon and Hanks in with Hitler is a bad idea.

edited 5th Oct '11 4:00:53 PM by Micah

1. People/ is my idea. I've written that several times. 2. Gainax would actually be an organization, same with Sony or or MGM. 3. Giving different things the same namespace does NOT lump them together, any more than putting Roots and Mein Kampf in the Literature/ namespace lumps them together.

I support the Creator/UsefulNotes combo : it's what we're already using for page types, and it carries some actual semantic meaning (People participating in the creation of works vs. people referenced in works).

In contrast, People/ is way too vague (it's a license to create pages about random people), and there's no semantic value in a separate Organization/ namespace.

(Of course, if there's already a more specific namespace available, such as Music/ for bands, we should use that. But that won't cover all possible "creators", so we do need a generic catch-all.)

edited 6th Oct '11 2:57:05 AM by Jhiday

I don't see how People/ would be read as a license to do something, when that thing was never allowed on this site.

I agree that People/ is too vague, given that we're not The Other Wiki, but I don't like the Creators and UsefulNotes dichotomy. If I make a page about Wu Zetian because she's referenced in 17 different Anime, used as a Historical Domain Character in several books, has a movie about her and exemplifies several tropes, that does not strike me as a useful note.

In my opinion, it also serves to blur the lines between what is and is not a useful note, which right now is kind of being used as license to include The Other Wiki-type articles as useful notes.

Then maybe Historical Domain Character should become a namespace. If that's too long, we could create a shorter namespace, something like Historical Character/ or History/.